Carnë
by SerenLyall
Summary: Celebrían has sailed West to begin her journey of healing. For Elrond, left behind in Rivendell, there is no healing. There is only pain. Only despair. Only death. (And maybe, someday, healing.) (TW: SUICIDE ATTEMPT.)
1. Part I

**disclaimer:** not mine...

**rating / warnings:** Mature / TW: SUICIDE ATTEMPT

**notes: **If you want to read more, let me know. I may write a second chapter, depending on how I'm feeling and what peoples' response is like. (It would be about his healing.) As of right now, though, this story is complete.

Please let me know what you think.

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Part I

You let your feet run wild  
Time has come as we all oh, go down  
Yeah but for the fall oh, my  
Do you dare to look him right in the eyes?

'Cause they will run you down, down til the dark  
Yes and they will run you down, down til you fall  
And they will run you down, down til you go  
Yeah so you can't crawl no more

And way down we go  
Way down we go  
Say way down we go  
'Cause they will run you down, down til you fall  
Way down we go

~Way Down We Go, Kaleo

_Red._

There is more blood than he had expected.

It is a silly realization, he decides an instant later. He has seen men bleed out from torn arteries before—has seen Elves and Humans alike drain their lives away with each pulse of their hearts, blood gushing and spurting and spraying from ripped jugulars, cut forearms, pierced thighs. Why should he be any different, a mixture of the two as he is?

_Crimson_.

It runs from the riven skin, drips from the sleeve pulled up to his elbow to bare his forearm, seeps across the centuries-smoothed surface of his desk, coating quill and parchment and leather-bound book alike. He should care—should care that he is destroying the desk, is destroying the agricultural records he was reading over before he made his choice, is destroying the last book Celebrían gave him before her attack.

But he does not.

He cannot.

He is beyond caring. He is beyond sorrow. He is beyond regret.

_Scarlet._

The half-drunk decanter of wine sits abandoned on the corner of his desk, the glass-blown goblet he had been drinking it from lying shattered beneath the window. The pieces glitter in the light of Isil that drifts in through the open curtains, the stars shining cold and white and silver and bleaching from the midnight sky. Gil-estel sails across the heavens, brilliant and ever-watchful, baleful gaze sharper and keener than all the rest.

He does not care. He does not care.

He does not care.

The scalpel he had used to do it lays abandoned on the floor by his chair, half-blunt edge stained red and crimson and scarlet. The handle is smeared with it, the tip dripping with it, the edges dark with it. It had taken strength and determination—but he is in abundance of both. He always has been, since the earliest days, or so Maedhros had always said.

Not that Maedhros would have ever wanted him to use that strength and determination for this.

_You did it too,_ Elrond thinks bitterly, rising unsteadily and stumbling around the edge of the desk to the decanter. He has lost more blood than he had realized. He lifts the decanter in his untorn arm and drinks straight from the lip, his shaking hand spilling a stream of wine down his chin to the front of his tunic and robe.

He does not care about that either.

_Who are you to judge me?_ he sneers at his dead foster father silently.

_And what of your other father?_ a treacherous voice asks him. _The one watching you do this to yourself now?_

_Who is he to care?_ he demands of his absent father sailing overhead, turning and looking up and out of the window. He takes another long, spiteful drink of wine. _Who is he to give a damn, when he abandoned me and Elros to our fates long before the Fëanorians ever came?_

_And what of your people?_ the voice asks. _Will they not be heartbroken?_

_Who is anyone to give a damn?!_ he shrieks to his Valley, draining the decanter.

He staggers and catches himself on the edge of the desk, the now-empty decanter falling to the floor with a crash. For a long second he stares at it dumbly, wondering at the shining shards littering his carpet.

It is like his soul, he decides: broken irreparably, with no hope of healing or restoration. It is shattered, the edges sharp and dangerous—dangerous to himself, dangerous to others. It is hopeless, devoid of life, absent of future use.

It is nothing now—nothing but empty, broken shards of glass. Just like him.

He screams.

_She's gone!_ everything in him wails. _She's gone! You couldn't save her, and now you are empty, empty, empty. Broken. Damaged beyond repair. Destroyed._

He lands on his knees amid the shards of glass, ignorant of the way they cut through his hose and into his skin. All he feels is the emptiness yawning within him—in his heart and in his head, black and dizzying and all-consuming—and the blood streaming from his ravaged forearm.

A voice comes from beyond the door to his study. "My lord?" someone calls. "My lord, are you well?" They try the handle—only to find it locked. Footsteps recede down the hall, and Elrond rocks back on his heels, letting his head fall back. The ceiling swoops overhead, and dark shadows crawl along the walls and the edges of his vision, stealing his sight away.

"Why?" he begs. What he begs for, though, he does not know;.

More footsteps. A new voice—one that he recognizes.

"Elrond? Elrond, open the door."

Glorfindel.

"Valar-dammit, Elrond, open the door."

He sinks back, cradling his arm against his chest. The shadows swarm over his eyes, stealing the light of Isil, stealing the light of the stars, stealing the light of Gil-estel.

_Thud._

It is almost over.

_Thud._

It is almost…

_Crash._

"Ai Elbereth, ai Eru, Elrond, what have you don—"

Then: darkness.


	2. Part II: i

Part II

Alone [he] sleeps in the shirt of man  
With my three wishes clutched in [his] hand  
The first that [he] be spared the pain  
That comes from a dark and laughing rain  
When [he] finds love may it always stay true  
This I beg for the second wish I made too  
But wish no more  
My life you can take  
To have [him] please just one day wake  
To have [him] please just one day wake  
To have [him] please just one day wake

~Gaeta's Lament, Bear McCreary

i.

Elrond wakes to the feel of soft, cotton sheets and a drifting, spring breeze.

He opens his eyes slowly, and blinks against the golden afternoon light falling across his face. He is not in the healing wing, as he would have expected, but finds himself in his own rooms, sequestered in his own large, four-poster bed, the blankets tucked around his chest and legs, leaving his arms free. They are laid at his sides, his left arm bound tightly in red-stained bandages from wrist to elbow, his right hand curled loosely into a fist.

"Elrond!"

The voice is loud to Elrond's ears and full of relief. He turns his head to find Glorfindel half-rising from a chair pulled up to his bedside, a book falling already-forgotten to the High Elf's lap.

"Thank Eru you are awake," Glorfindel breathes, and this time, though his voice is still loud, Elrond can tell that his friend is not actually speaking in much more than a murmur. "We thought—I mean, I thought, and Erestor agreed, that— Well."

Elrond frowns. The words are blurring together, running and slipping and sliding into one another in a cavalcade of sound and meaning that Elrond cannot quite grasp. He blinks again, then sinks back into his pillows, turning his attention to the ceiling overhead. It is stone painted gold in the late afternoon sunlight, grey smoothed with spring air that drifts in through the wall of glassless windows to Elrond's left.

He should find it peaceful, Elrond thinks—soothing, comforting, relaxing.

Instead he finds it deplorable.

"What have you done?" he asks Glorfindel. His voice comes out in a rasp.

"What?" Glorfindel asks, clearly confused. "I—we, Erestor and I—saved you."

"Why?" Elrond asks.

Glorfindel is silent for a terribly, terribly long moment. The silence stretches on and on, heavy and enormous and eternal, until it feels as if it will swallow Elrond whole.

He does not mind.

At last, however, Elrond hears Glorfindel sigh and sink back into his chair, hands picking up the forgotten book with a rustle of leather-bound pages. "Because we love you," Glorfindel says, and his words are simple but profound, and they strike an awful cord in Elrond's chest. "Why would we not save you?"

"Because I did not want to be saved," Elrond tells him flatly. His voice is void of emotion, empty and hollow and bleak like night, like desert, like stone.

_Because I did not deserve to be saved. I failed her. _

_I failed her, and I failed my children, and she is gone, and I am nothing._

Glorfindel takes a long time to respond. When he does, his voice is laden with barely constrained emotion that Elrond, who will still not look at him—who still only looks up at the ceiling, eyes fixed on the cracks between each stone—cannot identify.

"You know not what you say," Glorfindel says at last. "I know you are blinded by your grief and your pain," he goes on quickly, "and I am sure that, right now, you believe what you have said. But the Elrond I know—the Elrond I love, the Elrond I trust, the Elrond I would follow to death and beyond—would never give up his life so easily."

Elrond's eyes snap away from the ceiling to fix on Glorfindel, his head turning slightly against the pillow. "Then you know _nothing_ of me," he snarls. His voice drips with venom, black and furious and sharp. He is too weak to sit up, and he knows it—he feels it in his bones, in his veins, in his flesh—but his eyes narrow and his lips thin into a dangerous, white line. "How dare you pretend to know me better than I know myself?"

"Because you are blind and deaf and ill with grief right now," Glorfindel says calmly, either ignorant of or choosing to ignore Elrond's wrath. "Because you are _not _yourself right now. If you were in your right mind, you never would have tried to kill yourself."

Elrond sneers. "Then clearly you know nothing of me," he spits. "Because this _is _who I am. The man who tried to kill himself _is _me, and no matter what you do or say, that fact will not change. I want to die, Glorfindel, and you took that choice from me—and I will never forgive you for that."

Glorfindel shrugs, still seemingly unperturbed. "So be it," he says, and rises. "There is nothing in this room with which you can kill yourself," he says. "I have Sung the glass out of the windows, and the sheets are too thin and fine for you to use as a noose—they will tear before you can apply enough pressure to strangle yourself. You will not kill yourself, Elrond Peredhel, no matter what you may want, and if you will never forgive me for that, then so be it."

With that, he turns and strides towards the door out of Elrond's bedroom. He hesitates at the door, though, and turns back to fix his blue, blue eyes on Elrond's slate grey. "I am glad you are awake," he says, bows, and then vanishes through the door, closing it softly behind him.

Exhausted by his anger, Elrond falls back into his pillows. He stares back up at the ceiling, and lets the fading sunlight dazzle his eyes and dazzle the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes.

_They should have just let me die,_ he thinks, and then drifts off to sleep.


	3. Part II: ii

ii.

When Elrond wakes again, it is to find that night has fallen, sweet and gentle and starlit. A lamp burns on the table to his left, yellow and orange and gold, and when he turns to look at it he finds that Erestor is seated in Glorfindel's vacated chair, a book open in his hands. He is reading silently, his eyes sliding back and forth across the page.

He must hear the change in Elrond's breathing, however, for he looks up and over the edge of the book, sees Elrond's eyes fixed upon him, and lowers the tome. He is smiling.

"Ah," he says, marking his place in his book with one long, deft finger, "you are awake. Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

Elrond is both, but he shakes his head. Erestor nods, as if Elrond had confirmed something he had suspected, and then rises, placing his book on the seat of the chair.

"All the same," Erestor says, "you should eat. I had hoped you would awaken, so I asked for a tureen of broth to be brought for you." He disappears from the room for a moment, before returning with a covered bowl and spoon. He sets them down on the table holding the lamp, and helps Elrond sit up, plumping the pillows at Elrond's back to support him. Then, perching on the edge of the bed, he uncovers the dish, releasing a stream of rich-smelling steam. Sinking the spoon into it, he dips out a ladle-full, which he then lifts to Elrond's lips.

Elrond's jaw tightens. "I can very well feed myself," he says coldly.

Erestor arches an eyebrow, but does not argue. Instead he drips the broth back into the bowl, then holds the spoon out for Elrond. He takes it—and promptly loses his grip on it, his numb and silent fingers unwilling to bend around the stem. Though his right hand is uninjured, the blood loss has taken its toll on him physically, rendering him weak and hollow-feeling—leaving him unable to even hold a spoon, or sit up on his own.

The spoon falls to the sheet covering his legs, leaving a splatter of broth on it.

Calmly, and without comment—for which Elrond is grateful—Erestor picks the spoon up, and once more dips out a ladle-full. This time, Elrond does not argue when he attempts to feed him, only clenches his right hand into as tight of a fist as he can make, and obediently opens his mouth and swallows the thin chicken broth.

It is a slow, tiring, and humiliating process for Elrond. At last, however, the bowl is empty, and Elrond sinks back against his pillows, exhausted. Erestor places the bowl back on the table, then stands.

"Do you need to use the privy?" he asks Elrond.

Elrond grits his teeth and nods. He hates being an invalid, hates needing to rely on others for such basic needs as eating and walking to the privy. All the same, though, he does need it—and it _is_ his fault, this time—and so he will swallow his pride. He was never so arrogant as to refuse help when he knew he needed it—though there have been times in his past when he needed help but was unable, or unwilling, to accept that knowledge—and he does not intend to start now.

Erestor pulls the sheets back, away from Elrond's legs, and helps Elrond swing them over the edge of the bed. Then, looping one of Elrond's arms over his shoulders, Erestor straightens, drawing Elrond up with him. Elrond's legs buckle, and he would have fallen but for Erestor's steady, stalwart strength—strength far belying his willowy form and his scholar's nature. He is no warrior, and has never been, but he is stronger than he looks, and stronger than he seems.

"Easy, my lord," Erestor says softly, and then takes one tentative step forward, drawing Elrond along with him.

Elrond's legs shake, his hands shake, his body shakes. He takes one step forward, though, then another, then another, each one aided and supported by Erestor's stolid presence.

One grueling minute passes, then a second, before they reach the door leading straight from Elrond's bedroom into the bathroom he had once shared with Celebrían. The two of them stop for Elrond to rest multiple times, first at the end of the bed, then again in the middle of the open floor, then again against the large wardrobe standing beside the door. Then, however, they are in the large bathroom, Erestor guiding Elrond over to the privy standing in the corner.

The bathroom is a large, rectangular room with two doors leading out of it. A large bath, sunk deep into the stone floor, dominates the back half of the room, hidden for the moment by a screen stretching from wall to wall. Shelves fill the wall to the left and right of the door leading between the bedroom and the bathroom, and they are filled with linens—towels, sheets, blankets, washrags—as well as bathing supplies, such as bottles of soap, hair cleanser, scrubbing sand, and sponges. The privy is in a partitioned corner to the right, the sink—with one of the two large mirrors in the room hanging over it—stands beside the privy. The second mirror hangs on the wall beside the screen, a long, artfully carved table, now empty and barren, standing beneath it.

Elrond sinks down onto the privy seat gratefully, then nods at Erestor. The Elf bows, then retreats, closing the privy door behind him, leaving Elrond alone with his thoughts, his exhaustion, and the dim light of a single candle burning on the small table wedged between the privy and the wall.

Leaning forward, Elrond buries his face in his uninjured hand. His wounded arm he keeps cradled in his lap. The bandages are fresh and clean, he realizes for the first time since he awoke; someone must have changed them while he slept.

_How did it come to this?_ he wonders wearily. _How did _I_ come to this?_

He straightens and, looking down at the bandage wrapped around his left forearm, begins to unwrap it. Slowly, layer by layer, he reveals the mess of his skin. It is red and puckered around the rows of neat, black stitches that hold the edges of the riven flesh together, keeping him from bleeding out.

Touching the stitches on the longest, largest cut, which follows the main vein in his forearm, Elrond shivers. He could rip the stitches out; he could tear them out, and himself open, and he could bleed out in this privy without Erestor or Glorfindel realizing what was happening until it was too late. He could kill himself still—could end his pain and suffering, consigning himself to Mandos, resigning himself to the long process of healing beneath Námo's care…

A knock comes at the door. "My lord?" Erestor calls. "Are you done?"

"Nearly," Elrond calls, and quickly rewraps the bandages around his forearm, tucking the end into itself to keep it tightly wound.

He can kill himself later, he decides—later, when Erestor is not right outside the door, liable to come bursting in if he takes too long.

_Yes,_ he thinks. _Later. Tonight, when he is either gone or asleep._

Finishing his business quickly, Elrond calls for Erestor to come back in. Erestor does so, loops Elrond's uninjured arm over his shoulders, then helps him out of the privy and to the sink. Once Elrond's hands are clean, they make the slow, arduous trek back to Elrond's bed.

Elrond sinks down onto it gratefully five minutes later, sighing and carefully laying back as Erestor tucks the sheets back around his legs—and he is asleep mere seconds after his head touches the pillows, all thoughts of death fleeing from his mind in the wake of his crushing exhaustion.


	4. Part II - iii

**notes:**Okay. So. I kind of hated the last chapter I wrote...so I rewrote it. This is the new version. I hope you enjoy it... I'm personally far happier with this version, but...yeah.

Trigger warning for suicide attempt.

* * *

iii.

Elrond wakes to birdsong.

He frowns, a dream that feels half-forgotten lingering at the corners of his memory. There was a pond covered in lilies, surrounded by trees and wildflowers; there was a woman, dark-haired and silver-eyed, and a smile that could ignite the world with light; there was terror, and horror, and beyond that: peace.

Then the dream slides away, and Elrond sinks back into his pillows, feeling defeated.

His left arm throbs, and everything that his sleep had barred from his mind comes crashing back: Celebrían, his sons, his daughter…

Elrond closes his eyes against the tears that well. _You do not deserve to weep_, he tells himself sternly. _Tears are for the victims—and you are not a victim._

_You are nothing but a damnation and a doom to those you love. _

_For this is your fault—your fault, your fault, your fault… Celebrían sailed because of me—because of my failure to heal her. My sons have turned to vengeance and death and blood because she sailed. And my daughter—ai, Elbereth—Arwen has forsaken the Valley and all hope._

_And why? Because I failed: because I failed to save her; because I failed to heal her._

Cruel thoughts and crueler hatred swell in Elrond's mind and breast—thoughts that cut his mind to ribbons, and loathing that shreds his soul to tatters until he bleeds from a hundred thousand splinter-thin cuts. He bleeds, and the tears well in his eyes, fall into his hairline, seep onto the pillow beneath him.

_Do not cry,_ he tells himself in vain. _This is your fault, so how dare you weep for what you have lost—what you have damned yourself to lose? What you were doomed to lose from the beginning—doomed to lose because of who you are, who you were, who you are meant to be._

_You are made for suffering, Elrond Peredhel. Accept it. Welcome it. Embrace it. _

_You should never have touched her. Never should have married her. Never should have begat your children, love them though you do. The deaths of their hope are on your conscience._

_What is there left to me?_ he wonders. _What is there left for me but bleak and hopeless death?_

_Would it not be better to end it now? To take myself from the memory of this world? To keep anyone else from suffering at my presence and at my hands?_

He forces himself up into a seating position. He shakes, he trembles, he nearly collapses—but he binds his loathing into a tight ball and wedges it in his chest, lodges it between his ribs right beneath his heart until it beats in tempo with his hatred, black and oozing and filled with creeping tendrils that reach beneath his skin, along the avenues of his bones, down the pathways of his veins. He breathes it in, drinks of it, binds his will to it, until he is iron and tempered steel and fired wood.

Glancing around, Elrond finds that he is alone. With quick, sure fingers he unlaces the bandages wrapped around his left arm, and then with harsh, savage fingers begins to pluck the stitches from the longest, largest cut, following the artery in his forearm. Blood weeps from the reopened wound, circling his arm and dripping to the blankets covering his legs.

He is halfway done when the door to his rooms open. He glances up—and there, standing in the doorway, holding a covered tray, is Erestor. The tray falls from Erestor's hands, and then he is running—though not the direction Elrond would have expected. Instead of coming for him, Erestor turns and sprints from the room, disappearing into the hallway that connects the bedroom from the sitting room.

"Glorfindel!" Elrond hears him yell.

He is not bleeding fast enough. He will never bleed out before he is stopped—not unless he does something.

Elrond opens his voice and begins to Sing. The blood, already dripping from his forearm in a spreading pool, begins to run like water. It pours out of him, his heartrate increasing, his vein widening, the blood rushing from his brain and from his extremities toward his arm.

Then: pain. Sudden, blinding, incapacitating pain.

"_No."_

"_We will not allow you to do this, Elrond."_

"_I will not allow you to leave me on the heels of my daughter."_

"_You are precious to us—to all of us. To so many of us. We will not allow you to destroy yourself. Not like this."_

With a trembling, blind hand, Elrond reaches for the ring upon his right middle finger. He wrenches it off of him, and with it fades the pain and the voices—the two voices he knows, the two voices he would have, not days ago, professed to love. They were the voices of Galadriel and Mithrandir, the other two Elven Ring-bearers.

Footsteps. Elrond looks up, dizzy but no longer blinded by pain. There is Glorfindel, followed by Erestor, catapulting into the room. Glorfindel takes one look at the blood, and at the Ring in his hand, and pales.

"Give that to me," he says coldly, reaching for the Ring.

Elrond draws back.

"_Give it to me_," Glorfindel repeats. He reaches down, and forces Elrond's hand open, then plucks the Ring from his palm. He is too weak to resist, darkness already beginning to take hold of his vision. He wavers, then slowly collapses back onto the pillows, eyesight swimming, equilibrium gone.

Glorfindel holds the Ring for a second, then stuffs it into a pocket. He turns to Elrond, then places his hands on Elrond's forearm.

"I am not as good at this as you," he says, "but it will have to do."

He begins to Sing.

Scar tissue ripples. Flesh contracts. Muscle knits together beneath skin stretching in strings across the cut.

Elrond screams.

Then it is over. He lies, panting and weak, against the tear-stained pillows, beneath the blood-stained blankets. A thick, red scar marches down his forearm, following the path of the main artery, ending nearly at his wrist and beginning nearly at his elbow. What few stitches had remained lie on top of his legs, his body having rejected them as the flesh healed.

"What have you done?" Elrond asks.

"Saved your life," says Glorfindel. "Again."

Elrond turns haunted eyes upon his friend. "Damn you," he says softly. "Damn you to the Iron Hells. You know not what you have done."

Glorfindel smiles a tight-lipped, wan smile. He looks tired; he is not accustomed to Singing Songs of healing, and they are the most draining of Songs.

"I hate you," Elrond says coolly.

"So be it," Glorfindel says. "I hope you will some day come to forgive me—but if you do not, that is something I can live with."

And with that, he turns and walks out of the room, leaving Erestor to change the blankets on Elrond's bed, and smooth the hair from his sweaty forehead, and hum an ancient lullaby begat in the days before the Sun and Moon.

Elrond thinks he hates him too—but he falls asleep all the same, and dreams once more of a lily-covered pond, a dark-haired and silver-eyed woman, and nightingales.

He does not remember the dream upon waking.


End file.
